The incredible model and actress Cicely Tyson has been a fixture of the world of entertainment since the 1960s, having won an Oscar, two Emmys, and a Tony Award in her distinguished career. At the age of 95, Tyson shows no signs of retiring, now with an ongoing Emmy-nominated role in Shonda Rhimes’s show “How to Get Away with Murder.”
Featured on the cover of Time Magazine’s second annual “The Optimists” issue, edited by director Ava DuVernay, Tyson doesn’t consider retirement an option. “We have to honor this blessed gift that we have,” she told the magazine. “That’s what keeps you going. Keeps your mind fluid—your heart, your whole being.”
Tyson grew up in Harlem as a somewhat timid and reserved child but honed her performance skills in a local church that her family attended. “My mother, my father in particular was always grooming us for some recital in the church, so we always sang or recited or I played the piano,” she told Time. While Tyson never thought of what she was doing as “artistry,” this young musical primer would serve her later as an actress.
Her discovery of the world of performance was almost accidental, as Tyson was volunteering for the American Red Cross and soliciting donations from a theater company. The company happened to be putting on a production of Arthur Miller’s hit play “The Crucible,” based on the Salem Witch Trials, as Tyson entered and she was spellbound. “It was the most moving thing that I had ever experienced, and I was absolutely breathless when I left the theater.”
Despite opposition from her mother, Tyson managed to land her first role as an actress in 1956 in the mostly African-American cast B-movie “Carib Gold” shot on location in Key West and Miami, Florida. She also featured as a fashion model in Ebony Magazine and in the 1960s, and would go on to have several major roles on stage and screen, including the acclaimed series “East Side/West Side,” becoming the first African-American to star in a television drama.
The veteran actress told Time that she always trusted good roles would come to her if she was open to them: “My mother always said, when I went out to get a job I didn’t get and came home so beaten, ‘Let me tell you something: what is for you, you will get. What is not for you, you will never get.’”
After her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for the film “Sounder” in 1972, Tyson turned down a role in a prominent production that she felt didn’t represent her character. No sooner had she done that did the team behind “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” based on the book by Ernest J. Gaines, approach her.
Starring as an African-American woman of 110 years whose life spans the period from the end of slavery to the Civil Rights movement, Tyson won a double Emmy for Best Lead Actress in a Drama and Best Actress of the Year.
Tyson told Time that she has learned a great deal from many roles she has played over the years. “I am the sum total of each of the women I have played,” she explained. “That they were able to survive the times, and the way in which they did it, made me a stronger person and allowed me to truly believe that all things are possible.”
Many of the characters she has embodied are tough women like her who continue to fight for their freedom and happiness no matter what the odds against them are. When asked by Time if she considers herself an “optimist,” Tyson responded that for her, focusing on the good is the only way to survive.
“You really do have to have faith and belief and understanding in order to survive,” she said. “And know that you will not be defeated if you really think positive, about yourself and the life you’ve chosen to live.”
As for when it will all end for her, Tyson has faith that there is a bigger plan at work for her life. “The reason why I have been in this universe as long as I have been is because [God is] not ready for me,” she said. “When I’ve completed my job, he’ll take me away.”
